Performance, Security, and Encryption Essentials forSaaS Providers

The SaaS market is expected to grow by 196% from 2016 to 2020.¹ As the SaaS market continues to swell and become an integral component of business infrastructure, security and performance remains top-of-mind for both SaaS providers and their customers. As this growth continues, SaaS providers will face increased competition in delivering the most secure and performant applications to customers. Underperforming applications and those vulnerable to attack will inevitably experience a negative impact on revenue, end-user engagement, brand reputation, and customer churn. Beyond availability, SaaS customers expect that the applications they purchase are protected by SSL encryption and served from their own custom domain—rather than that of their provider. But doing so requires either significant investment (and ongoing maintenance) in automating the certificate lifecycle, or implementation of costly manual procedures that place a burden on customers to acquire, renew, and securely upload private keys and certificates.

Extend the performance and security benefits of Cloudflare to SaaS application APIs.

"Cloudflare’s solution just works. Their team accomplished all our requirements and customizations propagated near instantly. And, as an added bonus, their pricing is predictable and flat, regardless of how much our bandwidth usage grows."

With a single API call, Cloudflare will provision individual SSL certificates for custom hostnames and be ready to serve traffic over HTTPS within just a few minutes. No action is required on the SaaS provider’s customers’ behalf, other than initially pointing their domain or subdomain in via CNAME. In addition, Cloudflare automatically handles certificate management and renewals—without any need to contact or involve the SaaS provider’s customers.

Faster SaaS Application Experiences

Cloudflare improves the end-user experience of SaaS provider websites, applications, and APIs by reducing latency and optimizing the performance of content delivery, while extending these benefits to end customer Internet assets. At the core of Cloudflare’s solution is a global content delivery network (CDN) of 121 data centers across 58 countries, bringing content closer to visitors of every region; additional CDN optimizations include auto-minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and Gzip compression, which save over 20% on the size of files and resources. Real-time network intelligence found in Argo’s smart routing finds the fastest paths available, routing around congestion and maintaining open, secure connections to eliminate latency imposed by connection-setup. For additional availability with reductions in latency, Cloudflare Load Balancing distributes traffic across multiple servers, routing it to the closest geographic region, while rapidly avoiding failures.

Cloudflare includes a suite of web optimizations to improve the performance of Internet assets. Optimizations include the latest web standards, such as HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, as well as proprietary enhancements for images and mobile device visitors.

Railgun compresses previously uncacheable web objects up to 99.6% by leveraging techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. This results in an average 200% additional performance increase.

DNSSEC is the Internet’s non-spoofable caller ID. It guarantees a web application’s traffic is safely routed to the correct servers so that a site’s visitors are not intercepted by a hidden “man-in-the-middle” attacker.

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